CHOCOLATE AND CHAMPAGNE, a comedy in the spirit of Lubitsch

A Beverly Hills woman wakes up middle-aged and finds her life with a younger man undignified.

The stage version was performed in New York at the Creative Place Theatre. Think of...

...only this is her movie, and she gets the younger guy.

Diana, a woman of a certain age, deals with a birthday by throwing out her younger live-in Jim.

They're
right for each other, and she regrets it immediately, but she
can't take him back: her daughter Jackie, who idolizes and competes
with her, tells her Jim has seduced her, and Diana believes it.

So she makes do with the respectable but empty new life she'd thought she needed—with older lawyer Griff.

Jim gives a driving lesson to
frantic neurotic Betsy, who almost shoots them off a cliff. He
calms her down and she takes him home. But he can't forget Diana.

Proposed cast: Cher (Diana)

DIANA,
the Hamlet at the heart of this comedy, is a clothes designer with
a boutique on Rodeo Drive, a house in Beverly Hills, and a younger
lover, Jim, her kept man for two years now. There’s nothing she
can’t handle—except getting older.

Proposed cast: Gael García Bernal (Jim)

JIM
is happy with a champagne-and-sports-car life, but he’s also a
talented script-writer who’s postponing seriousness into a future that
never comes. Together they’re fast company. They must have been
brilliant at her birthday party last night.

This morning, though, even while he’s making love to her, she’s
spooked. She tells him he has to go. She wants something more
presentable, more—respectable—before it’s too late.

Which shocks him. He takes life as it comes, but this is a bit violent.

Proposed cast: Kathy Bates (Betsy)

BETSY,
the suicidal widow of a husband she drove to suicide, is too
scattered to pass a driving test, takes a lesson with Jim, spins the
car onto a Mulholland Drive cliff and is ready to gun it and take
him with her.

Proposed cast: John Goodman (Griff)

Diana's
lawyer GRIFF, more her age and on her success level, has been in
love with her for years. Now’s his chance. When Jackie tells Diana
the lie that Jim has seduced her Diana gives up on Jim and tries
to make a go of it with Griff.

Proposed cast: Adelaide Clemens (Jackie)

JACKIE,
Diana’s daughter, idolizes her and so misses no chance to pick at
and defy her. Inwardly shaky, she is outwardly impish and sexy.
She thinks she’s in love with Jim; in fact what she needs is a
father.

Proposed cast: Jack Roth (Dylan)

Betsy's
son DYLAN—eccentric hair, psychotic eyes, twitches constantly and
rhythmically as if keeping time to music he doesn’t much enjoy—is
in the same class at UCLA with Jackie, over whom he moans
uncontrollably. He disgusts her.

Proposed cast: Rosie Perez (Maria)

MARIA,
Diana's housekeeper, is the deadpan foil to Diana's Hamlet, secret
ally to Jim, and the one person Diana doesn't dare defy.

Proposed cast: Stockard Channing (Gwen)

GWEN is Diana's mischievous best friend and alter-ego. She'll
take Jim if Diana doesn't want him! Just kidding. In an attempt to
bring them back together she throws a party and invites both of them,
but it turns into a confrontation....

And the final character is Beverly Hills—

—the tone, the climate, the village size and ambiance that make it inevitable for these people to collide.

The stage version of Chocolate and Champagne was produced by Love Creek at the Creative Place Theatre in New York.

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present Toby Tucker?—slacker extraordinaire, kept man, between fortunes but committed to refined living, fugitive from the it-isn’t-doing-you-any-good-unless-it-hurts society, evading responsibility with style, narcissist with undeniable charm—but more than just a pretty face.